


Childhood, Adults Always Say, Is The Happiest Time In Life

by Not_You



Category: Watchmen (Comic), Watchmen - All Media Types
Genre: Age Regression/De-Aging, F/M, Fluff, Gen, Kid Fic, M/M, Minutemen Era, laurence schexnayder feels, mention of sex work and pony play
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-23
Updated: 2017-05-23
Packaged: 2018-11-04 01:09:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10979214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Not_You/pseuds/Not_You
Summary: The Minutemen and their long-suffering manager know better.  With the entire team reverted physically and mentally to childhood, Laurence Schexnayder does the best he can while they wait for the effect to wear off.





	1. Chapter 1

Laurence sighed deeply, pinching the bridge of his nose and gently sloshing his mostly-empty bottle of scotch. Everything would be fine. Three days ago they had said it would last four days, so if he could just stagger along and get them all safely tucked in that night, they would all revert at midnight. Really, things hadn't been all that different, since they all acted about seven years old anyway.

"Mr. Laurence?" That was the other thing, none of the little brats could pronounce 'Schexnayder'.

"Yes, Sally?" He sat up and turned around wearily. 

The worst part of all of this was that some of them were so goddamned cute. He didn't like kids. He would even go so far as to say he detested them, but there was Sally with her red pigtails and the gap between her front teeth, her eyes so wide and earnest. He had been keeping them all at Headquarters, so Sally was wearing one of HJ's t-shirts, which made a very long dress and was neatly belted with a lace from Eddie's boots, since they were way too big for him at the moment anyway.

"We're hungry."

"Oh. Oh, right." He groaned, and stood up. "I'll see what I can put together." 

Damn Angie for being too sick to help out much. He had to admit that the assiduous way Ursula tended her every slightest imposition was kinda cute, but the poor kid should really have been in bed, and he had sent her there, telling her that he could manage on his own, and damning himself to this, going through the cupboards and looking for something to feed a bunch of pint-sized vigilantes. 

In the next room, Nelly was tied up with jumpropes for probably the millionth time since they had all been regressed, and it gave Laurence the creeps when he came in to tell them to come and eat. He couldn't tell them to stop it, because they weren't really doing anything little boys didn't do. Despite not remembering anything, HJ and Nelly had taken to each other immediately, and Nelly was always happy to be the robber or the cattle rustler or the monster or whatever would get him tied up. Laurence already knew more than he wanted to about their goddamn freaky sex life, and now he had to watch it play out as far as prepubescent kids could take it.

Hollis was generally Nelly's accomplice, coming to rescue him, and was in the process of fighting HJ to the death on what was apparently the edge of a cliff when the promise of dinner made them fly to undo the knots like little sailors.

Hollis offered to go find the others, and Laurence was glad to let him go, since Hollis was no trouble at all, unlike the rest of them. Nelly was already whining about the food, and Laurence vowed that if he did not backhand the little snot before this was all over, he would damn the expense and hire a hundred dollar an hour hooker to do things that were illegal in the state of New York. 

Dinner was a fucking zoo, as usual. HJ ate like he had been raised in a barn, Bill had to feed his goddamn doll, Nelly had to fuss about everything, and everyone had their own special issues. Ursula yanked Sally's pigtails and he had to separate them while Eddie shoved Byron, trying to make him cry. Laurence actually felt sorry for the kid and moved Eddie, too. Sure it was easy to get Byron to cry, but he was more actually delicate than whiny. Afterward, as he sat in the shambles of the kitchen while they all ran off to create still more mayhem, he groaned and reminded himself that it was almost over.


	2. Chapter 2

Really, almost the first thing to do had been to truck off down to the Goodwill. After the initial panic and finding everyone clothes and telling them that his name was Laurence Schnexnayder and he was going to take care of them, it had been fucking imperative to find some toys. He wasn't quite sure how old they were and suspected some slight variation anyway, but none of them would've looked out of place in a first grade classroom, and all of them were bright-eyed, bored, and glowing with health. 

Well, except for Nelly, who mercifully in all his babbling had told Laurence that he had had asthma as a kid, and was a little pale and spindly. But for breaking things, he was worse than the rest put together, because he had an incredible knack for figuring out how to get into things. Laurence had never thought about it, but a kid that thought the way Nelly did would be a real pain in the ass. He might be a whiny little bitch, but he was by God going to figure out a way onto the top of the bookshelf, when the others had long since given up. Until you gave him some jump-ropes, of course. Then he was suddenly no trouble at all. Ugh.

Really, he'd meant the jump-ropes for the girls. That was what little girls did in his faded-newsprint memories of his own childhood. That and hopscotch. But no. He'd dumped a sack out on the floor and told them all to take their pick, and to be good and share. Nelly had gone right for the ropes, and then had proceeded to explain to HJ that no, you didn't have to use them for sissy girl games like double-dutch, you could use them to play cops and robbers. HJ had nodded, and the two had gone merrily off to haunt Laurence's nightmares. 

He'd meant the doll for the girls, too. Really, for Sally. He had figured Ursula to be the type of girl that ostentatiously didn't like dolls, going by how butch she acted normally, but she and Sally had actually both gone for the building blocks and started to make something that looked like Stonehenge more peacefully than he had ever seen them work on anything in his life. 

So it had somehow been up to Bill to pick up the poor little naked baby doll, and he had gone right off to find something to wrap it in. It had been his inseparable companion ever since, for reasons Laurence couldn't begin to fathom. He had had to tell them their names (Hooded Justice was just HJ), but it was clear they remembered the rules, since Nelly knew he was a sissy, and Eddie had immediately started making fun of Bill, who had just ignored him until Eddie tried to grab the doll. Then Bill had punched him in the nose and Laurence had told a howling Eddie that that was what he got for harassing people. 

Somehow, big, strapping, football-playing normal Bill had begun as the kind of boy who played with dolls. Whenever there was a game of tag or catch going on, he would take it to his office and carefully make it comfortable on the desk, and play so normally it made Laurence's head spin. Then at the end, right back to the goddamn doll. 

The kid was a better mother than most of the women Laurence had ever known, and he watched him in quiet amazement. He had ascertained that the doll's name was Amy-Marie, and he was wondering if they would have to keep the damn thing afterwards. He felt kind of guilty for having gotten them such crummy toys, but there was no sense in going top of the line for four days. Ditto with the clothes, although kids were always ruining their good clothes at the drop of a hat anyway, so why bother even for real ones?

He got up and rolled up his sleeves, getting to work on the dishes. They had been living on a pretty steady diet of casserole, since even Laurence could make a creditable one if he had a recipe, and they were more nourishing than PBJs, which were the only other real option. Nelly bitched constantly, of course. Laurence sighed. He wasn't a _bad_ kid, just prissy. None of them were bad kids, not really. Not even Eddie. Okay, maybe Eddie, but he could be heartbreakingly sweet, and if he didn't remember Laurence was never going to tell him that he had crawled into his sleeping bag on the first night, for protection against assorted monsters.


	3. Chapter 3

Musing, he had gotten about halfway through the dishes when the clomp-thud of little feet told him that HJ was approaching at high speed. As he turned, he would hear high-pitched, desperate wheezing, and groaned, wiping his hands on his pants. HJ had picked Nelly up and run all the way to the kitchen with him, since he was still a goddamn horse compared to rest of them. He looked panicky, and Laurence sighed, rubbing HJ's crewcut with one hand and digging Nelly's inhaler out of his pocket with the other.

"Relax, he'll be okay. Nelly, open up." He complied, and Laurence gave him one shot straight to the back of the throat like it said to do on the directions, which Nelly naturally kept with the inhaler the way you were supposed to and no one ever actually did. It actually said three shots, but Laurence figured that was an adult dose. One seemed to work for the pint-sized model, and he was breathing normally again in seconds, HJ gently setting him on his feet. "There you go. Feeling better?"

"Yessir."

"Good. Now get out of here and let me finish the dishes." HJ took Nelly's hand and towed him away, leaving Laurence shuddering over the dishpan. 

At least they were mostly normal, and it was context that made it creepy. Poor Byron was just a weird kid. He sat around and read books from off the shelves, everything from Nelly's military histories to Ursula's lesbian pulps and poetry. He looked up words he didn't know, and asked Laurence very serious questions. Usually about things he'd never thought to worry about before that subsequently kept him up at night. Like, 'If no one can touch cows in India, what happens when they get sick? Can you really just let something sacred die right in front of you?' Jesus! Now he knew why Byron was such a wreck!

Hollis seemed to sense how morbid Byron was somehow, and brought him cheerful things whenever he found them. Bill had him read to Amy-Marie, and of course it couldn't be too scary for the baby. Laurence had even gotten in on the act by borrowing a few volumes of the cheerful, non-lethal kind of fairytale, and it seemed to help a little. And Sally would sometimes Shanghai him into playing house, negating the entire issue. Or Ursula would insist that they were wolves and had to run through the building howling, looking for someone to eat. He looked at the clock. Seven. In about an hour they'd start to crash, and hopefully by nine they'd all be down. And then he could get things in order and wait for them to snap back to their true forms.

Laurence suspected that Nelly would be the biggest pain in the ass out of all of them if he wasn't sharing a room with HJ. As it was, he didn't even need a story, just snuggled under his friend's massive arm and dropped off in seconds. HJ cuddled him like a teddy bear, and while it was totally creepy, Laurence had to admit that it was kind of sweet. Bill had his doll and his glowing health that made him sleep like a log, and Byron would quietly read himself to sleep with something simple and harmless. The others, though. Sally and Ursula both insisted on a story, Eddie actually needed a lullaby (Laurence wasn't sure which of them it would serve as blackmail for when everything got back to normal) and Hollis seemed to have insomnia.

"Come on, Hollis. I know you're tired."

Hollis sighed, and let Laurence scoop him up and carry him back to bed for the fifth time. "Can't sleep."

"Kid, do I have to make you a glass of warm milk?" 

In the end, it was midnight before Laurence got to slump onto the floor of his office and pass out, mostly because poor Byron had had a nightmare. Laurence had finally given up and tucked him in beside Bill, who had given him a friendly hug and promptly fallen asleep again, taking Byron with him. Laurence groaned, and buried his head under one of the pillows he had dragged in from home. He fell asleep wondering what he would do if they didn't change back.


	4. Chapter 4

"Hey, Laurence." He jolted awake see Sally, blessedly curvy and brassy, her old self again.

"Oh, thank god." He sat up, rubbing at his eyes and yawning. "Christ, I can't wait to sleep in a real bed again. The rest are back too, right?"

"Near as I can tell. Eddie and I are the only ones awake."

He could hear Eddie rattling around in the kitchen, and his deep grumbling about wanting a goddamn beer was music to Laurence's ears.

Bill came shambling out a minute later, still absently carrying Amy-Marie. He was wrapped in his gaudy cape. "Gosh, were we kids for four days? I didn't realize superheroing would be _this_ weird."

Sally grinned. "It was a new one on me too, kid." She laughed. "You never seemed like the doll-loving type."

He shrugged sheepishly. "I've got a lot of sisters. And Ma just said it would make me a good father later."

"It probably will, Billy. Where's Byron?"

"...Is this like where your or Mr. Schexnayder asks where HJ and Nelly are and I'm not really supposed to answer?"

"No, honey. I'd really like to know."

"He's, uh... He's smoking a reefer cigarette on the fire escape. He said that childhood was a time of profound and delirious misery and that he needed a moment to collect himself."

Laurence groaned. "Please tell me it actually looks like a cigarette?"

"Oh, yes sir. He rolled it up so neat you can't tell until you get close enough to smell it."

"Well, thank god for small favors." Laurence stumbled into the kitchen, nearly colliding with Silhouette, who had apparently had the same idea he did. He backed off and let her make the coffee, since had no quarrel with the searing, life-giving tar she brewed. He leaned against the counter and sighed, watching HJ come padding in, in full costume. Naturally the most secretive of them had gotten fully dressed as soon as he was recognizable. Nelly was scrubbing at his face with the sleeve of one of HJ's shirts, which covered him even without his boxers.

"Good morning, everyone. I see we've all returned to our normal states?"

"Morning, Nelly." Sally grinned.

Laurence sighed, and took the cup of pitch black coffee Ursula gave him. "Oh, thank god." He muttered again as Byron and Hollis came in. Hollis was the one who started putting breakfast together, of course. The scent of bacon and eggs calmed everyone down, and before long the kitchen was a greasy mess and pandemonium reigned, but at least the children were feeding themselves.

Later, finally relaxing with a bit in his mouth and 120 pounds of professional on his back as he cantered around the room, Laurence was glad he hadn't lost his temper with Nelly.


End file.
